A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systemes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
Solutions have been developed for navigating through 3D assemblies of parts. For instance, specification tree is a two-dimensional (2D) graphical widget to show hierarchy relation between assembled 3D parts. It is loosely coupled with the 3D representation by means of “cross highlight”: the selection of a node in the specification tree triggers a highlight of the corresponding 3D representation of the part displayed, and the selection of a 3D representation of a displayed part triggers the highlight of the corresponding node in the specification tree. However, this solution is not efficient because the “cross highlight” can highlight just one 2D node/3D part pair at a time, to understand a large assembly, the user needs to go back and forth many times between 2D specification tree and 3D representation. In addition, it does not scale well on large assemblies because the maximum number of elements can be shown on one screen is limited and depends on the size and/or definition of the screen on which the specification tree is displayed; consequently, the user needs to scroll up and down to navigate on a large assembly of parts.
Further solutions have been developed wherein the hierarchy information is directly embedded into a three-dimensional structure that is displayed to the user. The drawback of this kind of solution is that the 3D structure does not allow efficiently exploiting the screen space, thus making it as a bad solution on large assemblies.
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved navigation through the hierarchical structure of a 3D modeled assembly of parts.